Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the data stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as virtual machines, databases, file servers, web servers, and so on. The company may similarly protect computing devices used by each of its employees.
Companies also seek innovative techniques for managing the costs associated with explosive data growth. For instance, companies often migrate data to lower cost storage over time and employ data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data and pruning lower priority data, etc. For example, virtual machines that are backed up but rarely used may reside in lower-cost secondary storage at any given time, yet may need to be quickly restored to service.